I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (33 page)

O
ne night I went to the theater and saw
La Cage aux Folles
, a great theatrical success, an extravaganza about gays and cross-dressers and their heightened life. It was funny, poignant, perfect.

I made an appointment with HBO and sold them on doing our next doc on cross-dressers and transvestites,
What Sex
Am I?
Without knowing it, I had once more opened the door on an underworld of outsiders and survivors—brave, smart people who’d undergone intense bullying and nonacceptance. The cross-dressers who came out did it with style, but at the bottom, plenty of terrible heartache and confusion. In those days, these people were in the closet for good reason—they might be killed in their hometowns if they came out.

Like Alice, I’d entered Wonderland, and it became curiouser and curiouser.

I knew I was in deep when I was chatting on film with a group of cross-dressing prostitutes in a bar in San Francisco, and one tall, gorgeous, black hooker said to me, “You know, Lee, just because I have a
dick doesn’t make me any less of a woman!” and I nodded in agreement. “I know,” I said, and I meant it.

The middle-class cross-dressers who had adjusted the best, and were most content, were the married younger guys who’d come out to their wives and found acceptance. They were straight men who looked like regular guys. They didn’t want to be women, but they found sexual gratification and comfort from dressing, for the most part, in styles from the 1950s. These were big vintage shoppers, the happiest of them husbands who shopped with their wives, members of a closed club where the couples could relax and show off. They were not pretty women: They stuffed themselves into the sleeveless dresses, the pumps, the little hats with veils that were just like what Mama wore. And they gossiped like their mamas did when their mamas played bridge.

Those were the happy, well-adjusted cross-dressers.

The more deeply I explored, the deeper the problems and the pain I discovered, and for many of the beautiful young men, the ends of their lives—through botched operations and medical procedures and AIDS.

One happier story: Two women, a young lesbian couple, working-class, classic New Jersey. He-girl worked in a boiler factory, she-girl a down-to-earth, stocky blonde. Her father whispered to me how he wished they were “normal.” The he-girl had his big breasts removed, took male hormones, grew facial hair, and yes, his clitoris was lengthened.

I shot the couple in their backyard having a barbecue with all the guys from the boiler factory. The wife was serving food and drinks. Her mate was joking around the grill with the guys; a real guy.

Her father sneaked up to me, smiling his imp smile. “Normal at last!” he hissed into the camera. “Normal at last!”

•   •   •

W
hat Sex Am I?
was a knockout. Maybe our best documentary, in terms of depth, revelation about that particular world, one that’s just surfacing now as an acceptable lifestyle.

In 1985 I was invited to participate on the jury of the Taormina Film Festival, and
What Sex Am I?
was honored with a showing. The invitation to the Taormina Film Festival opened another uncomfortable door. My passport had expired.

I would have to face “Date of Birth” again.

On my passport was a date of birth that was a lie. I remembered adding a few years to my age on the passport so Arnie would think I was older. Be more comfortable about the sixteen years separating us.

Now I was stuck with it.

Mary Beth, Milton Justice, and I went down to the passport office from our editing rooms on 42nd Street. I was editing
Down and Out in America
with our editor, Milton Ginsberg.
Down and Out in America
was a seminal documentary for me, Joey, and our company; it went on to win the Best Documentary Oscar the next year in 1986.

Never mind—the old “Date of Birth” panic had moved in. Prue Glass researched the situation and provided me with a replica of a lost birth certificate under “Lyova Rosenthal.” I had my old driver’s license from California under “Lee Grant,” a new one from Delaware under “Lee Fioretti,” and my “Lee Manoff” passport. Prue contacted a woman at the passport bureau so that I wouldn’t have to wait in line for hours. Special treatment. I even had an appointment at three p.m.

We’d worked editing till two p.m., munching popcorn out of a big green plastic garbage bag, all of us, and brought the bag with us on the cab ride downtown to the passport bureau. My intention, of course, was to change the date of birth on the new passport to the
five-years-younger one on my driver’s licenses from California under Lee Grant and the recent one under Fioretti.

Three of us sat in attached chairs as we waited for the woman behind the counter, who was railing at four cowed Polish men. Beads of sweat rose on my upper lip. They left. Her name was on a plastic holder on the counter.

I took a deep breath.

“Hi, Angela,” I said to this strong Hispanic woman, holding out my hand. “Could I talk to you in your office?”

“Why talk in my office?” She frowned.

“Well,” I laughed, “it’s a delicate matter.” I whispered, “I want to change the age on my passport.”

“What do you mean, change your birth date?” she boomed.

Heads turned. Milton and Mary Beth filled their mouths with popcorn, hunched in their seats.

“Could we move to this corner? It’s a private matter.” She moved down the counter toward me, alert, careful.

“Well, you know I lied on my passport, this passport has me older than I am, you see Manoff, I’m not Manoff anymore, my husband, then, was older, so I added a couple of years to my age to make him feel more comfortable, and now I’m not a Manoff anymore.”

I was waving the California driver’s license Mayor Yorty had given me. We were both tense, wary.

Suddenly I burst out: “I’m an actress, goddammit, I’ve lied about my age my entire life. Why can’t you just do this for me?” The words hung in the air between us. Between me and the rest of the room. Milton and Mary Beth didn’t look up from the popcorn bag.

I saw the door slamming shut in the woman’s eyes, along with a glint of understanding.

“I can’t help you,” she said, and handed me back my passport. But she said it quietly.

I took the passport and went through the bubbly glass door, Mary Beth and Milton shuffling behind me. I rang the elevator bell and waited interminably for the old green elevator to come to our floor. We didn’t speak. I received a new passport with my old age in time to go to Taormina.

•   •   •

L
ina Wertmüller was a member of the jury at the Taormina Film Festival in Italy.
What Sex Am I?
had been invited not as a contestant, but as a film of interest, and I was asked to serve on the jury. To me she was a genius filmmaker, she was the first woman to be nominated as a director for the Academy Award, for her film
Seven Beauties
in 1976. She had a socio-comic view of Italian life, fresh and hilarious.

Taormina is a resort town, and our hotel was on a huge sandy beach, highly organized, long, long rows of beach beds tended by young men with towels, and changing tents. Formal. Not like Malibu. The jury meetings were interesting, but strained for me. I was the only member who spoke nothing but English. Also documentaries, in that period, were not rated as highly as they are now.

Lina saw it, though. Lina got it. Before seeing it, she rattled off in Italian in the jury room, effusive to those she knew, strong in her views, dismissive of those she didn’t know. I was happy just to watch her and listen to her great, raspy voice. After she went to a screening of
What Sex Am I?
she turned to me. She said good things; I was watching her face, so alive, gleaming. “I want to make a movie about the first couple. You could play the wife,” just like that. I was honored, overwhelmed. Then,
Wait a minute,
I thought, back in my hotel room.
What a great movie that would make, but it’s absolutely an American story. I should do it!
Should’ve, would’ve, didn’t.

In town we ran into Roger and Julie Corman and their brood, one still in a baby stroller. We had lemon ices. Roger and Julie are travelers. Wherever one is, they both are, with kids, doing film business. We’ve been warm friends forever. Roger directed Joey in his first speaking part in
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
. The cute guy on the motorcycle who tips off the bad guys on the phone in the gas station? That’s Joey.

After Taormina we went to Rome. There “the girl” surprised us. She came to hang out. She’d missed us. She did miss us. She meant it. My heart sank. Joey came to life.

We took a trip to the countryside. They jabbered away, walking together on the narrow streets, with me behind.

I looked at a small whitewashed building made of rocks. In the window was a black cat with a white neck, her paws curled in to her. She looked at me with curiosity. But distant. The way I felt. Distant.

When we returned to Rome, “the girl” wore a transparent embroidered cotton dress. We walked down the street. “The girl” towered over me and was almost but not quite unaware of the effect she had on the men walking by, and the traffic. Her half-unawareness plus her awareness of the effect she was having on men in general, and my man in particular, disarmed and defeated me. Cars honked, Italian men called out to her and whistled.

“How rude,” she said.

“Maybe if you weren’t naked, they wouldn’t be so rude!” I snapped sharply, looking up at her. For the first time I disliked her. We flew home.

There was a curtained compartment on that flight in first class. As I stood in the aisle, I looked through a split in the curtain. A beautiful Italian woman was sitting on a cot-like bed with her eleven-year-old son, also beautiful. She was holding a spoon toward his mouth, a
bowl in her hand, murmuring endearments, urging her big boy to eat from her spoon. His pink lips open, her red lips blowing on the spoon to cool the soup before bringing her hand toward his waiting face. Erotic. The image held the same sort of distance for me as the situation with “the girl” and Joey. Separate. Behind a curtain. Me looking in at them. Outside.

T
he exploration closest to my head and heart was
Down and Out in America
, which I’d been begging HBO president Michael Fuchs to do for two years. It was my personal comment on the Reagan years.

About Ronald Reagan, all-American Marlboro Man. To me he was all that—a Marlboro smoke screen, the voice of General Electric, his job on television. Like the Wizard of Oz with power, his handsome tan face with the manly, crooked smile, an advertisement for a “just like you” kind of guy.

He was also president of the Screen Actors Guild during the blacklist and quietly did his job of keeping actors’ protests unheard at the Guild meetings all the years he presided.

To me Reagan was the scariest kind of opponent, a smooth actor-salesman appeal fronting a ruthless anti-left, anti-union agenda.

Later, after he went from GE TV spokesman to Guild president to California governor to president of the United States, it was the first time I saw real people like me, not just drunks on the Bowery, become
homeless. In the eighties. In America. Soon after, his presidency broke the Air Traffic Controllers Union.

By this time I was making documentaries for a living, and everything in me finally felt free and unpressured. I was free to put my thinking, my feeling, my gut, into an art form that allowed me to yell about whatever cause or person I cared about, by examining the true lives, the true plight of people I felt privileged to bring to the screen.

I’m too shy and too afraid of rejection to sell and organize. But Joey filled all those roles as producer—Joey, who’s not intimidated by anything, who will pick up a phone, demand a meeting, be crazy, flirt, shock, and is also financially savvy. Because he knocked the doors down at HBO and, later, at Lifetime, it became possible for me to have a long healthy life in the documentary business.

•   •   •

W
hile waiting for permits and backing to do
Down and Out in America
, I went off to Yugoslavia to do
Mussolini: The Untold Story
, a big TV miniseries about the life and death of Benito Mussolini, played by George C. Scott. I was Mrs. Mussolini. My children were Robert Downey Jr., Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Raul Julia, and Gabriel Byrne. George C. Scott’s mistress was played by Virginia Madsen. Sarah Jessica Parker was Robert’s girlfriend back then, and we were all let loose in Zagreb.

The men in Yugoslavia are the handsomest and most reckless anywhere. Fridays after the last shot, cast and crew danced till dawn; some romanced till dawn. Joey came. He and Raul Julia led us in feasting on oysters and fine wine. We actors thrown together in Zagreb felt this experience was a gift. We had no instinct that we were dancing on the edge of a war that would tear the country to pieces six years later.

I had an emergency call from Joey. HBO was being wooed by another company wanting to do a documentary that was essentially my idea for
Down and Out
. I said, “Oh, give it to them. It has to be done. It’s more important that it gets done than for me to do it.” “Are you crazy?” he yelled. “You’ve pitched this for two years and you’re gonna let somebody else steal it?” He set the whole thing up with HBO, which turned down our competitor. I would get to explore America—the real America.

•   •   •

D
own and Out in America
was filmed all across the country. In New York, where we brought a hidden camera into a welfare hotel and filmed distressed families newly out of work and down on their luck, and also in the tunnels under Grand Central Terminal, where single men and some women had formed a small city under the railroad to keep warm and survive.

In the Midwest, we filmed the desperation and tears of out-of-work middle-aged factory workers, confused as kindergarten children at suddenly being unwanted. Generations of families who loved their jobs, loved their bosses, their companies. Nothing in their local histories prepared them for being fired forever. They were still loyal, but had nothing more to be loyal to.

We filmed a factory truck driver, sitting high in the driver’s seat, trying to figure out how to feed his family and start schooling himself for new upscale jobs in the outside world, which was where his former employer told him to look for work.

We filmed Minnesota farmers, all of whom had voted for Reagan. Two hundred and fifty heartland farms a week were being repossessed during this time. The farmers had been forced into bankruptcy, thanks to a combination of huge corporate farms squeezing them out
and their own small banks cooking the books and putting them out of business. The small towns around the farms were like stage sets, full of empty barbershops, groceries, diners. Deserted.

Our last location was filming at a tent city in downtown L.A., “Justiceville.” Almost a hundred desperate people, young and old, took over a street, formed a co-op, chose a mayor, and used that block as a base from which to live and try to find work. We were there when the city bulldozed it. In his own charming way, President Reagan had dismantled the country.

It was the most important time in my life, what I felt the sum of all my own experience had led me to. It would win HBO its first Academy Award. And us our first as documentary filmmakers, in 1986, ten years after my first Oscar as an actor.